The advent of the information age has resulted in generation of huge quantity of digital content which is growing continuously. In particular, even when users are selectively presented with content based on a limited set of interests, due to the vast amount of information, users may be overwhelmed. Accordingly, there is a need to present information to users in a way that does not impose a burden on the users.
Conventional technology provides limited functionality in summarizing textual content such as, for example, a webpage comprising online textual content or an electronic document (referred to hereafter as a “document”). Accordingly, users of conventional technology may be presented with a summary of a document in order to help the users to quickly consume salient information present in the document. However, such existing technology at least does not provide, for example, sufficient flexibility to content publishers in controlling the process of generating those summaries.
Further, a large quantity of information on the Internet is available in the form of webpages hosted by content servers. These webpages are generally stored in content management systems. One technical difficulty facing the provisioning of summaries to those webpages is the large number of webpages (HTML documents) to be processed without affecting other aspects of the HTML documents, such as the ability to deliver targeted advertisements to users within the HTML documents.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods and systems for generating summaries of textual content in various forms of electronic documents.